About Pamela Chestek

I’m SO glad you did, because I can tell you all about the Trolley Pub® transport services – note the care with which I’ve used the term as a trademark, although I will dispense with any effort to use it in adjective-noun form from now on. The Trolley Pub is a pedal-powered street trolley...

John Welch put in the call, and I’ll pick up. If you didn’t read his post on Emerald Cities Collaborative, Inc v. Roese, go read it now. Section 10 of the Lanham Act limits the assignability of intent-to-use trademark applications. One can assign an ITU application only after the Amendment to Allege Use or...

I am pleased to be speaking in San Francisco next week, December 21, at the Practicing Law Institute’s CLE on open source software “From Compliance to Cooperation.” Shane Curcuru, Vice President for the Apache Foundation, and I will be talking about trademarks in open source software. You can attend live at the PLI center...

A trademark ownership dispute generally means taking a very mushy set of facts and deciding who has the superior claim. Generally, avoiding likelihood of confusion is the paramount interest, so the outcome will mean that one party will have to cease its use. But sometimes courts allow what I call “tolerated infringement,” concurrent uses...

One of my most read posts is “What Nunc Pro Tunc Means.” It means “now for then” in Latin, which is hardly much help. Extensive Google research tells me that it’s used to correct judicial orders, but that’s not what brings readers to my blog. In the IP field we typically use “nunc pro...

I have written several times before (caution recursive link) about the copyright infringement lawsuit over the highly-successful “Jersey Boys” musical, based on the band the Four Seasons. Briefly, the widow of an author of an unpublished biography of one of the band members, Tommy DeVito, claimed infringement of the book. It’s very convoluted with...

We have one of my favorite things, a chain of title case, and one about a band name to boot. Usually band name cases are pretty ugly, about a bunch of people getting together without any legal formalities. But this is not that case. We have the 80’s glam band RATT (official website –...

Boy, is it hard to write an effective invention assignment for an employment agreement. First, under US law only a natural person can be an inventor, not a juristic person. When you have an employee whose job is inventing, the solution is to create an automatic assignment to the employer, which is generally done...

We have a case at the intersection of band names and zombie marks, clearly one for which the melody lingers on. In 1997 there was a jam session at SXSW that included the band Los Lobos. In 1998 some of the SXSW performers created a Grammy award-winning album called Los Super Seven; petitioner Daniel...

Lately we’ve been seeing an increasing number of trademark cases that revolve around the relative rights of different members of the same enterprise: a family of companies asserting a family of marks theory in Wise F&I v. Allstate Ins. Co., different chapters of the Salvation Army allowed to register similar trademarks in In re...

Ms. Chestek is admitted to practice in Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, New York and North Carolina and is Board Certified by the North Carolina State Bar's Board of Legal Specialization in Trademark Law.

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